They’ve put it in a new set of clothing, but Mahmoud Abbas’ strategy for the state of “Palestine” is the same as Yasser Arafat’s when the PLO was formed three years before Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza: War on Israel until it is destroyed. Jackson Diehl writes about it in the Washington Post, even as Tom Friedman and his ilk at the New York Times consistently blame Benjamin Netanyahu for the problem.
Meanwhile, short shrift is given, as usual, to Netanyahu’s putative partner. Yet the leader of the Palestinian “moderate” branch, Mahmoud Abbas, is not only refusing to make any concessions of his own but is also turning his back on American diplomacy — and methodically setting the stage for another Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Two weeks ago, Abbas blew up four years of U.S.-sponsored institution building, relative peace and growing prosperity in the West Bank by signing a “reconciliation” agreement with the Hamas movement — a deal that probably will obligate him to fire his progressive prime minister, release scores of jailed Hamas militants and bond his security forces with Hamas’s Iranian-equipped army. On Tuesday, he published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he committed himself to seeking a U.N. General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September.
It was, as the Times put it in a separate news story, “a declaration of war on the status quo.” Abbas’s new strategy is radically different: The U.N. vote, he wrote, will “pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights bodies and the International Court of Justice” — in other words, sanctions.
Meanwhile, there will be a change in Palestinian doctrine. The new goal will be one on which Abbas and Hamas can agree: not a peace treaty leading to statehood but statehood followed by negotiations, “a key focus” of which “will be reaching a just solution for Palestinian refugees” — whose return to Israel would mean its demise. “Palestine would be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another,” Abbas declared. This is a formula for war — or “the third intifada,” as Palestinians are already calling it.
The Obama administration and its allies appear suitably alarmed by all this. But their principal reaction so far might be summed up as, “Now we really have to put the screws to Netanyahu.”
Barry Rubin explains why Israel won’t go along with Abbas. He lists the many reasons Tom Friedman and his friends are so very, very wrong. And he points out that Muslims are raising their children to hate Jews—in spite of their protestations that they’re only anti-Zionist.
It doesn’t seem like Obama’s going to concentrate overmuch on Israel in his speech tonight. But he is rewarding Egypt without demanding proof of democratic reforms, or keeping the peace with Israel—which all of the candidates for president have called for eliminating. Our administration’s foreign policy is as feckless as Jimmy Carter’s, and many countries are going to pay for it—including Israel.
Just to add some more info to the context of Bibi’s battle here’s a recently translated article by Israeli journalist Ben Dror Yemeni
The Arab Apartheid
The little published information on the Palestinians by the complicit press which keeps the public ignorant of the lies and distortions of the Arab world.